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Movie Review: Bob Marley: One Love

Mike Tyrkus

The latest narrative film about a musician – Bob Marley: One Love – ultimately plays out more as a celebration of Bob Marley than as a “warts-and-all” biography; and that is to the film’s benefit.

Whereas the film could have become burdened by monotonously moving through Marley’s life from one pivotal moment to the next, it instead bounces around the singer’s story in a whimsical, often spiritual way that enables his saga to take on a more grandiose aura than might have been expected otherwise.

Bob Marley: One Love begins with Marley and his band prepping for a free concert in Jamaica. However, when threats of violence against the singer should he perform put his health and well-being at risk, the actual performance is cut short, and the rest of the film begins to play out. What follows is an inspiring story of the singer’s triumph over numerous adversities on his journey to become a musical icon he seems destined to become.

As the follow-up to director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s impressive 2021 film King Richard, Bob Marley: One Love does not quite live up to the promise of its predecessor. It instead proves to be an able and engaging biography, but the stakes present in King Richard – or even those another musical biopic like Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) – are simply not as organically present here and the drama suffers a bit for it. Regardless, the script by director Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers, and Zach Baylin (from a story by Winter and Flowers) succeeds in telling a tale that gains momentum as it moves bouncily along until it ultimately builds to the gratifying crescendo of the film’s final musical performance.

Kingsley Ben-Adir in “Bob Marley: One Love.” Photo by Chiabella James/Chiabella James – © 2023 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

As Marley, Kingsley Ben-Adir shines more in the candid, more personal moments than in the crowd-pleasing concert reenactments. It is in those more singular scenes that the nuance of Ben-Adir’s work is allowed to shine most brightly. Overall, it is not a jaw-dropping performance per se, but it is one of the more meticulous and well-executed examinations of character acting that has been seen in a film such as this. Other players, like Lashana Lynch (as Rita Marley) or James Norton (as Chris Blackwell), serve to effectively point out flaws that Marley quickly (or sometimes not-so-quickly) reacts to and overcomes (or succumbs to). In short, all the characters are subordinate to Marley’s and there is no real problem with that – other than a simple lack of variation.

Even though Bob Marley: One Love may not play as the most effective musical biography ever captured on celluloid, it does celebrate the singular talent of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century and reintroduces the greatness of his masterpiece – Exodus – for future generations.

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Mike Tyrkus

Editor in Chief at CinemaNerdz.com
An independent filmmaker, co-writer and director of over a dozen short films, the Editor in Chief of CinemaNerdz.com has spent much of the last three decades as a writer and editor specializing in biographical and critical reference sources in literature and the cinema, beginning in February 1991 reviewing films for his college newspaper. He was a member of the Detroit Film Critics Society, as well as the group's webmaster and one-time President for over a decade until the group ceased to exist. His contributions to film criticism can be found in Magill's Cinema Annual, VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever (of which he was the editor for nearly a decade until it too ceased to exist), the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, and the St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia (on which he collaborated with editor Andrew Sarris). He has also appeared on the television program Critic LEE Speaking alongside Lee Thomas of FOX2 and Adam Graham, of The Detroit News. He currently lives in the Detroit area with his wife and their dogs.

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